I’m in Brownwood, Texas. I’m here for the Boot & Saddlemaker Round-Up 2000. The show starts tomorrow, today was the swapmeet. It wasn’t in the Coliseum parking lot like it had been for the last two years…it was in a park on the other side of the highway. The park had big ol’ trees (shade) and dirt (yippee!…no hot asphalt). Nothing like grabbin’ up a pair of lasting pliers that’ve been sitting in the sun all day…YeeOUCH! I ended up buying some spools of thread from the Linn’s, they’re from Nocona,TX…Mr. Linn gave me a present, a pair of 15AA last, ones with real pointy toes. He had a pickup truck bed full of lasts. Mr. Linn told me he worked for Nocona Boots for 30 years. I think his swapmeet stuff is all that’s left of the Nocona factory…now that they’re just workin’ outa El Paso.
The best part of the day is just wanderin’ around talkin’. Bob Dellis was telling me about a “Florida” boot he tooled for Dave Little’s shop. I ask him if he thought he might be the only man alive that’s tooled a manatee…he shrugged and told me that tooling a manatee was easy…nothing to it. “Not like an armadillo, huh?” I asked. “Nah,” he said …”armadillos are harder.”
